This chapter contains sections titled: Happy Dating The End of Matchmaking Dating Lessons from the Animal Kingdom For Friends or Family Members.

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched (...) to each other. Reidentification, the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants. The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research. (shrink)

During the set-up phase of an international study of genetic influences on outcomes from sepsis, we aimed to characterise potential differences in ethics approval processes and outcomes in participating European countries. Between 2005 and 2007 of the FP6-funded international Genetics Of Sepsis and Septic Shock project, we asked national coordinators to complete a structured survey of research ethic committee approval structures and processes in their countries, and linked these data to outcomes. Survey findings were reconfirmed or modified in 2017. Eighteen (...) countries participated in the study, recruiting 2257 patients from 160 ICUs. National practices differed widely in terms of composition of RECs, procedures and duration of the ethics approval process. Eight countries used a single centralised process for approval, seven required approval by an ethics committee in each participating hospital, and three required both. Outcomes of the application process differed widely between countries because of differences in national legislation, and differed within countries because of interpretation of the ethics of conducting research in patients lacking capacity. The RECs in four countries had no lay representation. The median time from submission to final decision was 1.5 months; in nine approval was received within 1 month; six took over 6 months, and in one 24 months; had all countries been able to match the most efficient approvals processes, an additional 74 months of country or institution-level recruitment would have been available. In three countries, rejection of the application by some local RECs resulted in loss of centres; and one country rejected the application outright. The potential benefits of the single application portal offered by the European Clinical Trials Regulation will not be realised without harmonisation of research ethics committee practices as well as national legislation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:These Things I BelieveA. M. ShuhamI am a health care professional who has worked in the field for two decades. I have been part of small miracles and heartbreaking events, which kept me up at night. Although I do not [End Page 120] provide direct patient care, my advanced education and expertise allows me to advise members of the health care team when difficult questions arise about the goals (...) of treatment, questions about competency and interpreting patient preferences. I believe my interest in the field was shaped by my family’s experience dealing with the challenges that come with terminal illness and advancing age. I am humbled to have been part of their journey as they faced death with dignity and grace.Living in a small community presents significant challenges that may never occur in a large urban setting. The team you work with knows your family or the names of your children because in their spare time they are the piano teacher or soccer coach for your children, friends that knew you growing up. This close knit atmosphere can be a blessing when things go well and unbearable when mistakes are made or professionals disagree, because you still interact with one another outside the context of your professional role and this is when moral distress begins.I began working with A. J. ten years ago to facilitate the completion of a health care directive. At the time A. J was beginning to show the signs of a neuro–muscular disease experienced by other members of the family. In early 2000 most directives were fairly straightforward with the option to choose artificial nutrition and hydration or not. A. J. very specifically checked “none.” Years went by living independently for A. J. but as most illnesses progress so did A. J’s, and admission to a health care institution became necessary. In many situations medically assisted nutrition and hydration would be indicated, but in this case the wishes of the patient were known in the form of a health care directive. The decision makers inability to honor the directive was the purpose for my involvement almost a decade after my initial work with A. J.No matter where you stand in the debate regarding medically assisted nutrition and hydration being burdensome or ordinary care, most people believe in the importance of a health care directive given the histories of Nancy Cruzan, Karen Quinlan and Terri Schiavo. My objective was to compile the legal information that would elucidate the patient preferences and help staff and the decision maker understand it was time to honor the directive given the advanced stage of disease. Numerous attempts were made with the surrogate and health care professionals to help them understand state statutes on health care directives supporting a patient’s right to chose. It became clear that some of the team seemed disinterested in my concerns or my responsibility as a professional, and I began to believe the difficulty was a failure on my part to communicate clearly.During that first year conversations and meetings were scheduled with the patients decision makers and they felt unable to make a decision and requested the entire family provide input. Although they understood A. J’s wishes, they felt everyone should be in agreement. In my experience when leaving decisions of this magnitude to a large extended family, communications deteriorate and little can be accomplished. Some members in the family held fundamental religious beliefs and thought a miracle could change the prognosis. While I believe as health care professionals we must respect individual religious beliefs and values, we are also morally obligated to advocate on behalf of our patients a fundamental principle I hold dear.The health care team was no more eager to address the issue than the family. I had produced specific state statutes regarding the health care directive of a previously competent person and even in light of this information, some individuals continued to believe the surrogates decision took precedence over the directive. This growing tension left me feeling angry and ineffective, questioning my role in the organization, while watching A. J. linger in a state not chosen. I believed I had failed... (shrink)

Book synopsis: The most debated issue in aesthetics today Written by an international team of leading experts Addresses growing methodological concerns in the field Includes an extensive introduction which illuminates key issues Through much of the twentieth century, philosophical thinking about works of art, design, and other aesthetic products has emphasized intuitive and reflective methods, often tied to the idea that philosophy's business is primarily to analyze concepts. This 'philosophy from the armchair' approach contrasts with methods used by psychologists, sociologists, (...) evolutionary thinkers, and others who study the making and reception of the arts empirically. How far should philosophers be sensitive to the results of these studies? Is their own largely a priori method basically flawed? Are their views on aesthetic value, interpretation, imagination, and the emotions of art to be rethought in the light of best science? The essays in this volume seek answers to these questions, many through detailed studies of problems traditionally regarded as philosophical but where empirical inquiry seems to be shedding interesting light. No common view is looked for or found in this volume: a number of authors argue that the current enthusiasm for scientific approaches to aesthetics is based on a misunderstanding of the philosophical enterprise and sometimes on misinterpretation of the science; others suggest various ways that philosophy can and should accommodate and sometimes yield to the empirical approach. The editors provide a substantial introduction which sets the scene historically and conceptually before summarizing the claims and arguments of the essays. (shrink)

The Pythagorean tradition dominates the understanding of beauty up until the end of the 18th Century. According to this tradition, the experience of beauty is stimulated by certain relations perceived to be between an object/construct's elements. As such, the object of the experience of beauty is indeterminate: it has neither a determinate perceptual analogue (one cannot simply identify beauty as you can a straight line or a particular shape) nor a determinate concept (there are no necessary and sufficient (...) conditions for beauty at the semantic level). By the 13th Century in the West, the pleasure experienced in beauty is characterized as disinterested. Yet, on the basis that all cultural manifestations of the pythagorean theory of beauty recognize that judgments of beauty are genuine judgments, we would want to say that judgments of beauty are lawful. In addition, from ancient times, up until after Kant, philosophers of beauty within this tradition recognize two kinds of beauty: a universal, unchanging beauty coexisting with a relative, dynamic beauty. These two kinds of beauty and the tensions discussed above, are reconciled and dissolved respectively, according to the metaphysical/religious commitments of the particular author. As yet, however, these features of beauty have not been reconciled within a physicalist worldview. This is what I set out to do. (shrink)

The phrase ‘mathematical foundation’ has shifted in meaning since the end of the nineteenth century. It used to mean a consistent general theory in mathematics, based on basic principles and ideas to which the rest of mathematics could be reduced. There was supposed to be only one foundational theory and it was to carry the philosophical weight of giving the ultimate ontology and truth of mathematics. Under this conception of ‘foundation’ pluralism in foundations of mathematics is a contradiction.More recently, the (...) phrase has come to mean a perspective from which we can see, or in which we can interpret, much of mathematics; it has lost the realist-type metaphysical, essentialist importance. The latter has been replaced with an emphasis on epistemology. The more recent use of the phrase shows a lack of concern for absolute ontology, truth, uniqueness and sometimes even consistency. It is only under the more modern conception of ‘foundation’ that pluralism in mathematical foundations is conceptually possible.Several problems beset the pluralist in mathematical foundations. The problems include, at least: paradox, rampant relativism, loss of meaning, insurmountable complexity and a rising suspicion that we can say anything meaningful about truth and objectivity in mathematics. Many of these are related to each other, and many can be overcome, explained, accounted for and dissolved by concentrating on crosschecking, fixtures and rigour of proof. Moreover, apart from being a defensible position, there are a lot of advantages to pluralism in foundations. These include: a sensitivity to the practice of mathematics, a more faithful account of the objectivity of mathematics and a deeper understanding of mathematics.The claim I defend in the paper is that we stand to learn more, not less, by adopting a pluralist attitude. I defend the claim by looking at the examples of set theory and homotopy type theory, as alternative viewpoints from which we can learn about mathematics. As the claim is defended, it will become apparent that ‘pluralism in mathematical foundations’ is neither an oxymoron, nor a contradiction, at least not in any threatening sense. On the contrary, it is the tension between different foundations that spurs new developments in mathematics. The tension might be called ‘a fruitful meta-contradiction’.I take my prompts from Kauffman’s idea of eigenform, Hersh’s idea of thinking of mathematical theories as models and from my own philosophical position: pluralism in mathematics. I also take some hints from the literature on philosophy of chemistry, especially the pluralism of Chang and Schummer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:125. HUME ON PRIMARY AND SECONDARY QUALITIES Hume's view of the primary/secondary quality distinction is, I believe, a matter of considerable interest. It bears upon Hume's position in relation to Locke and Berkeley, and has important implications for general features of his epistemology and metaphysics. The central part of my discussion will therefore be taken up with a consideration of those passages from his writings in which Hume refers (...) to the primary/ secondary quality distinction. Hume's treatment of this aspect of the 'modern philosophy' may be seen against the background of his discussion of perception and its objects, and it is therefore this with which I begin. HUME'S SYSTEM I refer to Hume's system in relation to perception and the manner in which objects affect the senses. Hume's avowed purpose here is to discuss the way in which objects appear to the senses (in particular, those of sight and touch), rather than to account for their real nature and operations. Our ignorance of the nature of bodies reflects the fact that we are limited in experience to those properties of objects which discover themselves 2 to the senses. In determining the nature of Hume's system there are, I think, two (related) factors to be taken into account: (i) Hume's distinction between perceptions and objects; and (ii) Hume's critique of the Naive or Direct Realist theory of perception. (i) Perceptions and Objects The distinction which Hume wishes to make between perceptions and objects, and his general account of the relation between them, is embodied in his 126. discussion of the idea of external existence (T 6). We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and· ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by the perceptions they 3 occasion. We should note that what Hume is describing here is, in essence, the Indirect Realist account of perception, i.e. that we are acquainted with an external reality only in the form of perceptions ('impressions') which arise from sensory contact with it. That Hume is prepared to speak elsewhere of per4 ceptions in their relation to external objects as images is indicative of his commitment to a Representative theory. There are, of course, severe limitations upon our understanding of the relation between perceptions and objects. As every idea is deriv'd from a preceding perception, 'tis impossible our idea of a perception, and that of an object or external existence can ever represent what are specifically different from each other. In so far as external objects are supposed to differ from perceptions in their specific identity, we can form only a relative idea of them (T 68). Nevertheless the idea of bodies or objects is clearly to be distinguished from that of perceptions; while being specifically the same, like ideas and impressions, these items, or rather the ideas involved, are attended with the supposition of a difference, that is unknown and incomprehensible (T 244). As different existences perceptions and objects may be conceived to differ in respect of their relational properties, for example, but otherwise whatever is true of the one must also be true of the other. These two sets of distinctions — between, on the one hand, ideas and impressions and, on the other, perceptions and objects — may usefully be compared and 127. contrasted. In each case the items with which we are concerned are numerically different but specifically identical; and, furthermore, the relation between the items which make up each pair is a causal one. The obvious difference between the two cases is that while both impressions and ideas are objects of experience, the causal dependence of the one upon the other being revealed by the order of their appearance before the mind, we do not directly experience external objects as opposed to perceptions. Questions concerning the 'real nature' of objects or bodies belong to the province of natural - rather than 'moral' - philosophy, which indeed has reasonable hypotheses to offer (T 48). As for our idea of body, this comprises nothing more than the ideas... (shrink)

Background:Surveillance technology such as tag and tracking systems and video surveillance could increase the freedom of movement and consequently autonomy of clients in long-term residential care settings, but is also perceived as an intrusion on autonomy including privacy.Objective:To explore how clients in residential care experience surveillance technology in order to assess how surveillance technology might influence autonomy.Setting:Two long-term residential care facilities: a nursing home for people with dementia and a care facility for people with intellectual disabilities.Methods:Ethnographic field study.Ethical considerations:The (...) boards representing clients and relatives/proxies of the clients were informed of the study and gave their written consent. The clients’ assent was sought through a special information leaflet. At any time clients and/or proxy were given the option to withdraw from the study. The research protocol was also reviewed by a medical ethics committee.Findings:Our findings show a pattern of two themes: (1) coping with new spaces which entailed clients: wandering around, getting lost, being triggered, and retreating to new spaces and (2) resisting the surveillance technology measure because clients feel stigmatized, missed the company, and do not like being “watched.”Conclusion:Client experiences of surveillance technology appear to entail a certain ambivalence. This is in part due to the variety in surveillance technology devices, with each device bringing its own connotations and experiences. But it also lies in the devices’ presupposition of an ideal user, which is at odds with the actual user who is inherently vulnerable. Surveillance technology can contribute to the autonomy of clients in long-term care, but only if it is set in a truly person-centered approach. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lermontov And The Omniscience Of NarratorsDavid A. GoldfarbGod and fictional narrators are the only beings who are sometimes considered omniscient. God, who is sometimes regarded as not fictional, is frequently also regarded as omnipotent. Narrators, who normally seem to have no sphere of action save for conveying information to readers, particularly when they speak omnisciently in the third person, are not considered to have “power” in any way, because (...) they are supposed to function outside the story. God always speaks in the first person, and is regarded as an all-powerful agent.But what happens when the narrator gets in on the action? First-person narrators can enter the plot, speaking in the voice of personal narrative, and sometimes “know” as much or more than some third-person narrators who are supposedly “omniscient.” The positivistic “third-person omniscient” narrator of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, for instance, knows only what he sees, and though his omnipresence allows him to see quite a bit, he has virtually no access to the minds of the characters, as do the psychologically omniscient third-person narrators of Tolstoy or Henry James. If knowledge were thus limited in the context of a novel to observables, a first-person narrator who gets around enough could appear much like an omniscient narrator, while also appearing to present a particular point of view. Conversely, the third-person narrator’s seeming objectivity is similarly illusory. Any narrator “chooses” what information to relay, and when and how to relay it. In a sense, third-person omniscient narrators fictionally determine what counts as “the story,” creating the fictional world with their godlike voice. Some overbearing narrators, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s anonymous first-person narrator in What Is To Be Done, adopt not only an omniscient and objective standpoint with regard to the actions and [End Page 61] thoughts of the characters, but even presume to tell readers how to interpret the events in the novel. Therefore, all narrators have varying amounts of both knowledge and power, and in some cases they may approach, within variously circumscribed spheres of knowledge and agency, omniscience and omnipotence.In this essay, I would like to explore the range of constraints and effects of the narrator’s fictional power and knowledge. As a test case, I have chosen Mikhail Lermontov’s novel, A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni). Writing between 1837 and 1840, Lermontov was one of the first Russian writers to experiment with the form of the novel, influenced primarily by contemporary English, French, and German examples, as well as the classical epic, making this work, like many of the early Russian novels of the 1820s and 1830s, a jumble of narrative styles interestingly layered on each other. It is a particularly fecund work for studies of narrative subjectivity, because characters shift from narrator to narratee across a variety of genres, all in one text.A Hero of Our Time is composed of five major chapters: “Bela,” “Maksim Maksimich,” “Taman,” “Princess Mary,” and “The Fatalist,” the last three of which comprise the journal of the main character, the officer Grigory Pechorin. The “journal” chapters are preceded by a brief section, set in 1838 or 1839, sometime after Pechorin’s death, called the “Introduction to Pechorin’s Journal.” In “Bela” an unnamed traveler gathering stories in the Caucasus during the year 1837 meets an older officer, Maksim Maksimich, who tells a yarn about the Byronic adventures of Pechorin in the spring of 1833 involving his abduction of a Circassian woman after whom the chapter is named. The second chapter is an interlude, which takes place in 1837, where Maksim and the first narrator actually meet Pechorin, whom Maksim has not seen for about five years, and Pechorin gives his diaries to the first narrator. “Taman” recounts, in the form of a diary, a strange incident in which Pechorin, around 1830, meets smugglers while stranded in the Crimea and is nearly drowned by a young girl. “Princess Mary,” the longest tale, takes place in May 1832—a love story modeled after Aleksander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, culminating in a duel in which Pechorin prevails over a certain Grushnitskij, his friend earlier in the... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , (...) commonly referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:125. HUME ON PRIMARY AND SECONDARY QUALITIES Hume's view of the primary/secondary quality distinction is, I believe, a matter of considerable interest. It bears upon Hume's position in relation to Locke and Berkeley, and has important implications for general features of his epistemology and metaphysics. The central part of my discussion will therefore be taken up with a consideration of those passages from his writings in which Hume refers (...) to the primary/ secondary quality distinction. Hume's treatment of this aspect of the 'modern philosophy' may be seen against the background of his discussion of perception and its objects, and it is therefore this with which I begin. HUME'S SYSTEM I refer to Hume's system in relation to perception and the manner in which objects affect the senses. Hume's avowed purpose here is to discuss the way in which objects appear to the senses (in particular, those of sight and touch), rather than to account for their real nature and operations. Our ignorance of the nature of bodies reflects the fact that we are limited in experience to those properties of objects which discover themselves 2 to the senses. In determining the nature of Hume's system there are, I think, two (related) factors to be taken into account: (i) Hume's distinction between perceptions and objects; and (ii) Hume's critique of the Naive or Direct Realist theory of perception. (i) Perceptions and Objects The distinction which Hume wishes to make between perceptions and objects, and his general account of the relation between them, is embodied in his 126. discussion of the idea of external existence (T 6). We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and· ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by the perceptions they 3 occasion. We should note that what Hume is describing here is, in essence, the Indirect Realist account of perception, i.e. that we are acquainted with an external reality only in the form of perceptions ('impressions') which arise from sensory contact with it. That Hume is prepared to speak elsewhere of per4 ceptions in their relation to external objects as images is indicative of his commitment to a Representative theory. There are, of course, severe limitations upon our understanding of the relation between perceptions and objects. As every idea is deriv'd from a preceding perception, 'tis impossible our idea of a perception, and that of an object or external existence can ever represent what are specifically different from each other. In so far as external objects are supposed to differ from perceptions in their specific identity, we can form only a relative idea of them (T 68). Nevertheless the idea of bodies or objects is clearly to be distinguished from that of perceptions; while being specifically the same, like ideas and impressions, these items, or rather the ideas involved, are attended with the supposition of a difference, that is unknown and incomprehensible (T 244). As different existences perceptions and objects may be conceived to differ in respect of their relational properties, for example, but otherwise whatever is true of the one must also be true of the other. These two sets of distinctions — between, on the one hand, ideas and impressions and, on the other, perceptions and objects — may usefully be compared and 127. contrasted. In each case the items with which we are concerned are numerically different but specifically identical; and, furthermore, the relation between the items which make up each pair is a causal one. The obvious difference between the two cases is that while both impressions and ideas are objects of experience, the causal dependence of the one upon the other being revealed by the order of their appearance before the mind, we do not directly experience external objects as opposed to perceptions. Questions concerning the 'real nature' of objects or bodies belong to the province of natural - rather than 'moral' - philosophy, which indeed has reasonable hypotheses to offer (T 48). As for our idea of body, this comprises nothing more than the ideas... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Impact of Clinicians on the Diagnostic ManualThomas A. Widiger (bio)Keywordsdiagnosis, classification, DSM, taxonomy, clinical judgmentSurveys of clinicians’ opinions can be very informative. There is a long tradition within medicine that new disorders are discovered within clinical practice. The original edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) diagnostic manual (DSM) was based in large part on clinical experience. The recent editions have been governed more heavily by more (...) systematic research (Widiger and Clark 2000), but many of the new additions are still said to come from clinical practice. As described for the development of DSM-III (APA 1980), “if there is general agreement among clinicians, who would be expected to encounter the condition, that there are a significant number of patients who have it and that its identification is important in their clinical work, it is included in the classification” (Spitzer, Sheehy, and Endicott 1977, 3).Clinicians can also be surveyed with regard to their opinions concerning a proposed revision. The ultimate consumers of a diagnostic manual are practicing clinicians and any effort to develop an official nomenclature should consider the opinions of the persons who must use the classification within their clinical practice (First et al. 2004; Sadler 2005). Clinicians can also be surveyed (or studied) with respect to how the diagnostic manual is being implemented. Much of this research has demonstrated that clinicians might be failing to apply the diagnostic manual in a reliable or valid manner (Garb 2005; Kutchins and Kirk 1997).It is perhaps obvious, however, that a diagnostic manual should not be governed primarily by clinical opinion or current clinical practice. The authors of DSM-III (APA 1980) and DSM-III-R (APA 1987) indicated that they would include a new diagnosis within the official nomenclature if a group of clinicians indicated that it was important to their clinical practice (Spitzer et al. 1977). This liberal threshold led to the decision of the DSM-III-R Task Force to include such diagnoses as paraphiliac rapism, self-defeating personality disorder, and sadistic personality disorder despite the lack of systematic research supporting their validity and the likelihood that these new diagnoses would have harmful social and forensic applications (Widiger 1995). These diagnoses no longer even appear within the appendix of DSM-IV-TR (APA 2000) for proposed diagnoses needing further study.The authors of DSM-III avoided opinion surveys because “no one wanted to repeat the scene of the general membership voting on a presumably ‘scientific’ issue, as was done in 1973 on the [End Page 277] issue of the elimination of homosexuality from the DSM-II classification” (Spitzer, Williams, and Skodol 1980, 152). Matters of construct validity should probably be addressed through systematic research rather than through opinion polls. Decisions should be informed by a fair hearing of the diversity of perspectives, and these viewpoints and perspectives should be systematically and enthusiastically solicited. Nevertheless, the most scientifically valid decision may at times be “politically incorrect.” The authors of the diagnostic manual should have the authority to make innovative decisions that are scientifically justified even when they are contrary to general clinical consensus (Widiger and Clark 2000).Some persons, though, do suggest that the diagnostic manual should be modeled on how disorders are being diagnosed within clinical practice. This is perhaps most readily evident in the proposals of Westen and Shedler (2000) to diagnose mental disorders via prototypal matching. They eschew the provision of specific and explicit criterion sets in favor of simply matching the patient to a global (e.g., paragraph description) of a prototypic case. A purported strength of this approach is that it is said to “conform to the way clinicians think about psychiatric diagnoses” (First and Westen 2007, 473).There are, however, concerns with respect to prototypal matching. First, it is not really clear that clinicians actually provide diagnoses in this manner. There are data to suggest that clinicians instead reach a diagnostic decision on the basis of just one or two individual diagnostic criteria rather than matching to a global prototype (Herkov and Blashfield 1995).More important, it is unclear whether the diagnostic manual should in fact emulate what is occurring within clinical practice. There is a... (shrink)

It is natural to think that our ordinary practices in giving explanations for our actions, for what we do, commit us to claiming that content properties are causally relevant to physical events such as the movements of our limbs and bodies, and events which these in turn cause. If you want to know why my body ambulates across the street, or why my arm went up before I set out, we suppose I have given you an answer when I say (...) that I wanted to greet a friend on the other side of the street, and thought that my arm's going up would be interpreted by him as a signal to stop for a moment. This widely held view might be disputed, but I shall not argue for it in this paper. I want to start with the view that our beliefs and desires and other propositional attitudes are causally relevant, in virtue of their modes and particular contents, to our movements, in order to investigate the consequences for analyses of thought content. For this purpose, I argue, in sec. II, for three necessary conditions on causal relevance: (a) a nomic sufficiency condition, (b) a logical independence condition, and (c) a screening-off condition. In sec. III, I apply these conditions to relational and functional theories of thought content, arguing that these theories cannot accommodate the causal relevance of content properties to our behaviour. I argue further that, on two plausible assumptions, one about the dependence of the mental on the physical, and the other about the availability in principle of causal explanations of our movements in terms of our non-relational physical properties, content properties can be causally relevant only if they are nomically type-correlated, relative to certain circumstances, with non-relational physical properties of our bodies. In sec. IV, I respond to a number of objections that might be advanced against this conclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Database of Classical Bibliography ed. by Dee. L. ClaymanGerald A. PressDee. L. Clayman, editor. The Database of Classical Bibliography. CD-ROM and manual. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 120. $85 (individual); $340-2400 (institutional).L ’Annee Philologique (APh) has long been one of the most important scholarly resources for students of the history of ancient philosophy. Even though in print form it contains errors and omissions, has become (...) of unwieldy size, and does not appear promptly enough for up-to-date research, there is no other single source of such international comprehensiveness. It is far more inclusive in many respects than The Philosopher’s Index.The Database of Classical Bibliography (DCB) is a long-term project sponsored by the N.E.H., the American Philological Association and others to make the full contents of APh accessible from a CD-ROM either from individual PCs or on a local network. Unlike the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the DCB CD-ROM comes with its own search software (DCB CompLex) on the disk. This software is set up both for IBM and MAC machines, installs quickly, and operates extremely well. The manual gives clear instructions both for general use and for detailed search strategies. CompLex enables the user to search DCD in many different ways; e.g., by ancient or modern authors and works, by titles, publisher, place of publication, year of publication, journal, modern language, or series name, as well as by APh volumes, years, page numbers, rubrics, and topics. It can also search by any word in a modern language (i.e., in Roman characters) or for words in a Greek index. And CompLex enables one to perform more complex searches utilizing wildcards and Boolean operators in a user-friendly form.DCB Version 2, containing Volumes 45–60 (1974–1989), fulfills the editor’s initial commitment to make a new release available each year with the addition of three to five years, since it includes four years of APh (1973–74 and 1988–89) not on Version 1. Also new in Version 2 is a French interface and manual.DCB has faults, however. It repeats mistakes that appeared in the print version of APh and contains other mistakes that did not originate in APh. Many were noted in reviews of Version 1, but this should not be surprising in a work of such magnitude as either APh or DCB. What is perhaps disturbing is that errors noted in Version 1 have not been corrected in Version 2, though it would not seem difficult to make use of the information provided by careful reviewers.Nevertheless, DCB is a terrific scholarly tool. No college or university library should be without it. [End Page 619]Gerald A. PressHunter CollegeCopyright © 1998 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc... (shrink)

You'd never know Athens was locked in a life-or-death struggle from the tranquil and leisurely philosophical discussion that unfolds through the pages of the Republic...Plato's masterpiece continues to inform our questions and our thinking when it comes to being, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, community, the soul, and more." -From Dr. Littlejohn's Introduction. On the way back from a festival, Socrates is waylaid by some friends who compel him to go home with them. There he and his companions engage in (...) a long discussion about whether it is worse to suffer evil or to commit it. Far from being dry or abstract, Plato's dialogue is full of practical questions about the nature of justice, education, power, and virtue, and it ends with two of the most vivid myths ever devised by man. This Canon Classic is translated clearly by Benjamin Jowett, and unlike all other works of philosophy, it's actually fun to read. The Canon Classics series presents the most definitive works of Western literature in a colorful, well-crafted, and affordable way. Unlike many other thrift editions, our classics are printed on thicker text stock and feature individualized designs that prioritize readability by means of proper margins, leading, characters per line, font, trim size, etc. Each book's materials and layout combine to make the classics a simple and striking addition to classrooms and homes, ideal for introducing the best of literary culture and human experience to the next generation. This Worldview Edition features an introduction divided into sections on The World Around, About the Author, What Other Notables Said, Setting, Characters, & Plot Summary, Worldview Analysis, 21 Significant Questions & Answers, and Further Discussion & Review. (shrink)

The lodestone is an extremely rare form of the mineral magnetite that occurs naturally as a permanent magnet. It therefore attracts metallic iron as well as fragments of ordinary ‘inert’ magnetite. This ‘magic’ property was known to many ancient cultures, and a powerful lodestone has always commanded a high price. By the eleventh century AD the Chinese had discovered that a freely suspended elongated lodestone would tend to set with its long axis approximately north–south, and utilized this property in the (...) magnetic compass. They also appear to have discovered that this invaluable characteristic could be handed‐on to a steel needle if the latter were contacted with, or stroked by, a lodestone.The magnetism of the lodestone was scientifically investigated by William Gilbert in the sixteenth century, when he defined its ‘poles' and the well‐known rule that ‘like poles repel, unlike attract’. He also studied ‘inclination’ and ‘variation’, and means to aid the preservation of magnetic power. How to concentrate it by ‘arming’ the lodestone with caps or pole‐pieces of soft iron was discovered in the same century. These methods have been repeated, confirmed, and improved. The lodestone occupies a vital place in the history of magnetism, but little beyond Gilbert's work can be reached by historical studies because vastly improved steel or alloy permanent magnets, and electromagnets, replaced it before quantitative measurements were developed. These techniques have therefore been applied retrospectively to both museum specimens and contemporary natural lodestones. A good source of the latter was found to be the igneous complex known as Magnet Cove, Arkansas, and this material has been used as the ‘type example’. All specimens were discrete, well‐rounded, rusty brown pebbles found near the surface. Their unweathered interiors were black titanomagnetite. No significant trace element or crystallographic differences could be found between the lodestones and the magnetically inert material that always accompanied them. The magnetic moment per unit volume of the ‘as‐found’ Magnet Cove lodestones varied between 6.5 and 11.6 emu cm−3, which compares poorly with the hundreds of units characteritzing modern permanent magnets. Hysteresis loops gave a saturation intensity of 27–51 emu cm−3, suggesting that intensity has diminished since formation. This agrees with general experience of magnets, especially in the absence of a ‘keeper’. The initial volume susceptibility of Magnet Cove magnetite was about 0.18 for low fields, and always remained <1. This means that a normal terrestrial magnetic field with a maximum vector <1 Oe is unable to induce even the low magnetic moments we see today, while a field approaching 1000 Oe is required for saturation. These parameters, and the rare occurrence of lodestones as near‐surface fragments, support suggestions that they are the product of a lightning strike upon an exposure of a suitable magnetite. Transient currents averaging 30 000 A have been measured. This would give rise to a zone of potential magnetic saturation at least 12 cm in diameter, to which some of the ejected fragments would be exposed. An attempt to determine the period elapsed since formation of the Magnet Cove lodestone was made by annealing magnetically saturated specimens at temperatures up to 500°C, and measuring J v at weekly intervals for 100 days. The decay curves visually resembled exponential functions, but mathematical tests proved that they were not strictly so. Interpretation was therefore difficult, but a pragmatic procedure involving excessive extrapolation suggested an ‘age’ of about 3500 years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 284-303 [Access article in PDF] Accidental Art:Tolstoy's Poetics of Unintentionality Michael A. Denner I ART'S ABILITY TO INFECT another with an emotion, the concept that has come to be probably the most readily identified catchphrase in What Is Art? (though it crops up in his earlier writings on art), derives from L. N. Tolstoy's dynamic identity claim about art: we know an artist has (...) created a genuine work of art when he "hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them." 1 "What is art?" is then a taxonomical question, and, according to Tolstoy, art is identifiable from non-art not by some set of external characteristics—the way, say, Aristotle categorized animals in his natural history—rather art is recognizable by its function, by what it does. In this sense art is like a tool: A given thing is art because it performs a certain task, much as one might claim a screwdriver is anything that sets and removes screws, regardless of its external characteristics. Tolstoy, in fact, repeatedly refers to art as "orudie," "a tool," or even "a weapon."It is worth noting from the outset that this metaphor of contagiousness is one of sublimated violence. For its passive "perceiver" (Tolstoy's characteristic term for the consumer of art), art amounts to irresistible, surreptitious emotional manipulation by an external entity. Tolstoy is ever attentive to the underlying meanings of the words he chooses, and I think he means to emphasize the latent, etymological meaning of the zarazit', to infect, the root of which is razit', to strike, a military term that likely resonated with Tolstoy, a war veteran. 2 Etymological arguments aside, Tolstoy makes explicit the psychological violation that goes hand-in-hand [End Page 284] with the experience of a work of art in a diary entry from a period of work on an earlier variant of What Is Art?: "One must hone the artistic work so that it penetrates. To hone a work means to make it perfect artistically, in which case it will pierce through the indifference...." 3 In an earlier version of the essay, Tolstoy offers "hypnotism" as a synonym for infection (p. 53).With its ability to "penetrate" through indifference and colonize, willy-nilly, the other, art accomplishes directly and immediately what no amount of rational argument could accomplish: "Art is differentiated from the activity of rational activity, which demands preparation and a certain sequence of knowledge (so that one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing geometry), by the fact that it acts on people independently of their state of development and education, that the charm of a picture, of sounds, or of forms, infects any man whatever his plane of development" (p. 178).The effect of art does not depend on some graduated, sequential process as it does for rational activity: art's infectiousness is immediate and irresistible. According to What Is Art?, the summum bonum of art's infectiousness, its best use, but notably not its only, is bringing about the Kingdom of God by effecting a change in the psychology of all the individuals who experience it. "Religious art," Tolstoy's supreme category of art, surmounts the (ultimately illusory for Tolstoy) individuality of the perceiver by inducing in him or her an emotional union with the artist and all others who have experienced the work of art, thereby inducting all perceivers into the universal collective of humankind: "In this freeing of our personality from its separation from other people, from its isolation, in this uniting of personality with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art" (p. 228). Art is a sacrament and the artist a priest of sorts.It is often said, even by those who have read the work, that Tolstoy "rejected" art in the last decades of his life, and What Is Art? is often cited as evidence. Granted, much of the book excoriates much of the art of the ages, but one must not... (shrink)

There has been an increase in recent years in the use of empirical methods in healthcare ethics. Appeals to empirical data cannot answer moral questions, but insights into the knowledge, attitudes, experience, preferences and practice of interested parties can play an important part in the development of healthcare ethics. In particular, while we may establish a general ethical principle to provide explanatory and normative guidance for healthcare professionals, the interpretation and application of such general principles to actual practice still (...) requires interpretation and judgement. And many situations in healthcare practice are complex and may involve a variety of principles, each of which may conflict with the others. Simple surveys or interview studies may not be sufficient if we wish to develop a nuanced approach to ethical practice that can be set out in guidelines, codes or directives. We do not resolve moral questions by plebiscite. In this paper, the authors argue for the use of consensus methods to develop shared understanding of ethical practice, and they argue further for the combination of the Delphi method with the use of vignettes to illustrate the kind of situations that may occur in practice. They develop their argument in part by reference to their experience of using this approach in their recent research. (shrink)

The author offers a defense for elective death on utilitarian grounds, but one that is presented specifically from the perspective of someone who: 1) faces a potentially terminal illness and diminishing quality of life; 2) views death as nothing more than a return to prenatal nonbeing; and 3) maintains common humanist ethical commitments. The argument, then, is uniquely situated and limited in scope, rooted both in the particulars of his recent experience with a rheumatic autoimmune illness and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (...) as well as in a worldview shaped largely by emerging narratives in the sciences. Drawing upon the work of J.S. Mill and P. Singer, the author begins by assuming that one is generally free to act on a preference for nonbeing so long as others are not unduly harmed or thwarted in pursuing their own aims as a result. But a humanist, he suggests, ideally ought to press beyond this minimum criterion and do one’s best to maximize eudaimonia by carefully weighing how elective death would likely affect others to whom one is currently obligated in significant ways. The focus of one’s ethical reasoning, then, should remain on maximizing well-being and minimizing harm, not on creating a logical flawless and internally coherent defense that may satisfy a set of abstract or universally applicable criteria drawn up by others in an effort to define precisely what might render a given suicide “rational” or “morally permissible.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing with Mountains1Paul A. Harris (bio)For Sydney Levy, who brought me on board.Geologic AspirationsStone breathes within nature's time cycle…. It begins before you and continues through you and goes on. Working with stone is not resisting time but touching it.—Isamu NoguchiUnder the suffocating circumstances of lockdown, COVID conditions inevitably wafted their way into the stoned thinking of Pierre Jardin.2 The pandemic atmosphere made air apparent, and breathing became personal, (...) political, and planetary. People sought perspective in sometimes surprising ways. While many turned to the Stoics, Jardin turned to stone. Suspending his disbelief in "The Hammock of Relaxation" (fig. 1), Jardin stretched his imagination, and set himself adrift in diffuse reveries of rocky respiration. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.The Hammock of Relaxation. Pebble on book cover.Photo by author.Jardin composes a life centered in absorbing stone(s), encompassing both a physical process of soaking in a substance slowly and psychological experience of becoming engrossed in it. He feels alive with stone and stone alive in him; literally and metaphorically, he has spent hours looking at stone, listening to stone, and touching/being touched by stone. But he had never seriously considered breathing stone. Immediately, a slew of questions arose: Do rocks breathe? Do mountains? Does the Earth? What would it mean to breathe with a stone, or with the planet? Jardin's pursuit of lithic and lithospheric respirations came to comprise his geologic aspirations, which are set out here. [End Page 261]Aerial ImaginationPierre Jardin's geologic aspirations took inspiration from Gaston Bachelard's aerial imagination, as described in Air and Dreams. Accepting Bachelard's invitation to "listen to nothing but our own breathing…, to become as aerial as our breath…" (Bachelard, Air 241), Jardin set about inventing a regimen of contemplative breathing exercises. To do so, he took up what Bachelard terms the "search for a thought hidden under expressive sedimen,ts, [in which] a geology of silence is developed" (Bachelard Air, 251). The question was, what "expressive sediments" should Jardin mine in this quixotic quest? What materials and mental modalities would precipitate a "geology of silence"?In order to meld minds with Bachelard, Jardin placed a pebble on Robert Lapoujade's pencil portrait that graces the book's cover (fig. 2). The results were alchemical: the cobble transmuted into a philosopher's stone, opening Bachelard's third eye; the rock launched a basalt on Jardin's senses that produced an "intoxication of aerial imagination raised to its cosmic role" (Bachelard, Air 241). A gesture as simple as placing a rock on a book crystallized new quartz-veins of thought. What follows are Jardin's experiments with a variety of "expressive sediments," a series of multi-scalar meditations and various instantiations of lithic respiration. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Aerial Basalt on the Senses. Pebble on book cover.Photo by author.Atmospheric CompositionsPierre Jardin's geologic aspirations began with a Composition of Place, a meditative technique deployed in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Loyola stipulates that "for contemplation or meditation about visible things… the 'composition' will consist in seeing through the gaze of the imagination the material place where the object I want to contemplate is situated" (Ganss 47). Taking "Breathing with Mountains" as the "object" of contemplation stretches Jardin's imagination to a geologic scale; its "material place" is the Earth's atmosphere, or more specifically, its lowest layer, the troposphere. [End Page 262]To facilitate his meditation, Jardin scales Earth down to a stunning serpentine stone, which he has mounted like a globe. Holding the stone and breathing slowly, Jardin can visualize the troposphere as the thinnest of films on the rock's surface. In his active imagination, the bumps, furrows, and ridges in the rough rock texture evoke the constant crumpling of the lithosphere caused by drifting and crashing tectonic plates.With the stone standing in for Earth, Jardin suddenly becomes a geologic giant representing Anthropocene humanity. As his exhalations cloud the stone, Jardin considers how Anthropogenic expirations are changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. An index of human impact is provided... (shrink)

Helen Fielding, in examining Yael Bartana’s video art works, in particular, Wild Seeds (2005), argues that politics seem to privilege the temporal, and video art thus lends itself to this enactment. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, she concludes that the in-between, while a space and not a territory, is more a spacing, a taking place between people “no matter where they happen to be” than a place as such. In Bartana’s works, the temporal aspect of video allows her to open up (...) a time-space, or rather a spacing as a relation rather than a place. It is a spacing that takes place only when the art work sets to work in its engagement with viewers, that is, when the video is playing in a public space. Moreover, Bartana generally takes up temporally circumscribed events that are deeply embedded in the past, yet show up either disjuncture or parallels between national identity and individual embodied narratives. While national identity might rely upon fusion, Bartana’s videos upset that identity by opening up a spacing where identity can be questioned. Filming events such as a demonstration, an initiation into military weapons training, as well as play, her videos draw upon ritualized events that, in their repetition, are often meant to work performatively at a corporeal level to create a national and cultural unity. Her videos affectively and phenomenally draw the viewer into the corporeal experience of these rituals in order to show up the ruptures; indeed, they seem to suggest that it is at the level of the corporeal that this cohesion can both be effected and also undone. In other words, rather than focusing on national identity which is exclusive and hence spatial, corporeal being-with is temporal—the polis is figured as embodied intermittent relations or spacings rather than as an actual territory or space. -/- . (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly apparent that human embryo research has the very real potential to generate significant humanitarian benefits. Equally, it is clear that the destruction of embryos that such research inevitably involves is highly controversial within societies such as ours, where many hold either that from the moment of conception the embryo is morally considerable or that as a member of the human species it should not be treated as a mere means. How might we balance the potential humanitarian (...) benefits of embryo research against the various strongly felt moral objections to such use?In this rich and highly sophisticated work, Guenin argues for the experimental use of a bounded range of embryos, namely those which were intentionally produced for research ex utero and for which the progenitor has explicitly banned any intrauterine transfer. He argues that since they are not possible persons, it is morally permissible to perform experiments on this set of embryos .1 Indeed, he suggests that given the suffering that such research might relieve, it would be uncaring for us not to undertake it .As one might expect, the focus of the book is primarily on stem cell research. The ‘pluripotent’ stem cells one finds in …. (shrink)

The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on its (...) resolution. We distinguish between merely influencing people’s opinions and providing genuine learning, where the latter requires that the source of the change in opinion should be reliable. Other important ideas here are the extent to which authors of fiction may be considered to provide testimony, or something like it, and the possibility of recognizing an unstated purpose in the project of the fictional work. We ask whether fictions can furnish us not merely with ideas but with reasons for believing them, perhaps by constituting thought experiments. We consider whether the focus should be on understanding rather than on knowledge, and whether fictions can inform us about the qualities of another’s experiences. We briefly describe some experimental work of recent decades and suggest that the evidence for learning from fiction is currently meagre. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Intensive professional testing of children with disabilities is becoming increasingly prominent within the field of children’s rehabilitation. In this paper we question the high quality ascribed to standardized assessment procedures. We explore testing practices using a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach analyzing data from interviews and participant observations among 20 children with disabilities and their parents. All the participating children have extensive experience from being tested. This study reveals that the practices of testing have certain limitations when confronted with the lived (...) experience of those who are being tested. Testing seems to transmit the experts’ view of what is important, correct and admirable, and the way in which an individual child fulfills such requirements and fits in with the predetermined standard. Regular testing may result in insecurity on the part of the tested individual, and possibly to a lack of confidence in their body and the way it functions. For the individual being tested the meaning of testing is primarily related to passing or not passing the test requirements. Given the meaning of testing, children with disabilities may experience repeated testing as an ordeal that they are expected to put up with. By illuminating the experiences of the ones exposed to testing, this paper offers new insight for professionals to gauge more accurately the quality of contemporary testing practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ NoteJames M. DuBois, Ana S. Iltis, and Heidi A. WalshFrom childhood, David Slakter had undergone tests and invasive procedures to monitor his nephritis. It was not a surprise when in 2015, doctors told him he needed a kidney transplant. The wife of a childhood friend was a close match and gave him one of her kidneys. Before his transplant, aerobic exercise was difficult; a few months after (...) transplant, Slakter could ride his bike, hike, and work out with a personal trainer. He no longer had to weigh food or gauge his potassium consumption, a concern for people with kidney failure. For Slakter, “life post-transplant has been a significant improvement.”Individuals or family members of those who have received an organ transplant from a living or deceased donor share their stories in this issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. The symposium is titled “Receiving the Gift of Life: Stories from Organ Transplant Recipients.” Organ transplantation can extend an individual’s life by decades. It can also greatly improve an individual’s quality of life, as was Slakter’s experience. At the same time, organ transplantation is expensive and stressful. Recipients can experience complications, including organ rejection, and there are few appealing alternatives.After her heart transplant, author Leilani R. Graham required four open-heart surgeries, ECMO, and an intra-aortic balloon pump. She experienced delirium, necrotizing pneumonia, and severe muscular atrophy that required her to re-learn how to walk. She struggled with weight gain, explosive mood swings, hair loss, and was terrified that her body would reject the new heart. For Graham, “[Transplant] was not the miracle [she] was hoping for.” Graham says she felt unprepared for and inadequately informed about what to expect after her transplant, which left her “battered, beaten, and bruised” with a 12-inch line from neck to navel and “bullet holes” up and down her torso from the chest tubes. When reflecting on her experience post-transplant, Graham says, “It wasn’t the physical trauma that hurt the most. It was that no one seemed surprised [by the aftereffects of transplant].” Seemingly no one, that is except Graham, who calls on transplant providers to “prioritize empathy.”The symposium editors are Jason T. Eberl and Tristan McIntosh. Three commentary articles, written by Macey Leigh Levan, Heather Lannon, and Vidya A. Fleetwood, Roslyn B. Mannon & Krista L. Lentine, offer important insights into the authors’ stories. The editors thank Mid-America Transplant, the UCSF Lung Transplant Program, Donor Connect, William L. Freeman, MD, MPH, MJIL, CIP, Janet Monk, and the individuals who gave anonymous donations to support the publication of this issue, an open-access VOICES edition of the symposium, and accompanying teaching guides.The research article in this issue, “‘A Shell of My Former Self’: Using Figurative Language to Promote Communication about Patient Suffering,” was written by Tyler Tate, Elizabeth Stein, and Robert A. Pearlman. The relief of suffering is a primary goal of medicine. However, the authors note that clinicians often miss or ignore suffering because they focus on the causes rather than the experience of suffering, or the subjective nature of suffering makes it difficult to discuss. The authors believe that “the key to communicating about suffering lies in finding [End Page vii] the right kind of words to describe the experience” and say that figurative language offers a promising approach. In their research, the authors performed qualitative analysis on 52 works of literature and identified 254 excerpts of figurative language with themes of non-physical or psychological suffering. The authors found 13 salient themes: brokenness, diminishment, disorientation, drowning, emptiness, imprisonment, battle, darkness, isolation, invisibility, lifelessness, punishment, and torture. The authors reiterate that developing a shared language of suffering could foster a therapeutic patient-clinician relationship and improve clinicians’ ability to recognize and address a patient’s experience of suffering.María Susana Ciruzzi wrote the first of two case studies included in this issue. “The Sword of King Solomon” addresses a tragic and difficult subject—how to navigate the situation posed by conjoined twins when “any decision will produce damage and suffering.” The case involves two infant male patients born at 37 weeks gestation as omphalo-ischiopagus conjoined twins... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 389 From the perspective of this reviewer, the presently most obvious fault in this lecture lies in Putnam's criticisms of "the coherence theorists, Ludwig, et al." (p. 97). In this criticism, it is apparently assumed that the adequacy of their proposed solution to the problem considered must be judged solely on the basis of what is presently known. Since Putnam himself acknowledges that no satisfactory interpretation of (...) quantum mechanics exists, this seems unwarranted. The superficiality of the criticism of this position makes this particularly notable. He states, for example, "to say that a wave gives an incomplete description of the state of a system is to say that systems whose state can be described by that wave function may really be in several quite different physical conditions." He then adopts the doubtful strategy of appealing to the meaning of completeness and incompleteness (they are not a matter of degree) in justification of the position that it is improper to say that a wave gives an incomplete descriptionl Despite the fact that, taken as a whole, his brief criticism of the coherence theory is somewhat ungracious. Putnam has set forth the principle issues sur~ rounding the problem with discerning lucidity. Paul K. Feyerabend, in "Problems of Empiricism," places a revisionist's version of empiricism in a carefully developed historical perspective. Empiricism as it has been known is both incomplete and weakened by undesirable assumptions. The incompleteness is to be removed by regarding empiricism as a cosmological hypothesis concerning the relation between man and the universe. The version of empiricism thus admitted has the character of a scientific theory. The undesirable assumptions are views no longer tenable of the nature and content of what is given in sense. Feyerbend understands sensations and perceptions as indicators on a par with indications of physical instruments, and likewise in need of interpretation. A philosophical method is proposed which requires theoretical pluralism instead of the theoretical monism that is (inappropriately) the ideal of much of contemporary empiricism (p. 149). The function of theoretical alternatives is to provide the means of criticizing accepted theory, to which he accords careful historical treatment. "Low level theories" are to guide us to crucial experiments, while "high level theories" are to represent the basic element of the universe. Here again the reader will find a theme which emerges erpeatedly in these lectures. This theme might be stated as follows. Both macrocosmic and microcosmic systems must ultimately be involved in scientific explanation. The crucial problem that emerges is how these two are to be related or in some degree integrated. By the way in which he develops the role of alternative theories, Feyerabend has affirmed one of the principle theoretical components of what Hegel was minded to call metaphysics. An additional observation, for which what I have said should furnish some justification: Many points made throughout this exposition (115 pp. in length) might properly be regarded as together constituting a rapprochement of empiricism and rationalism. It may very well occur to the thoughtful reader that Feyerabend, in his reconstruction of empiricism, has come very near to conceding all that a critical rationalist could ask. Other lectures included in the book are, "The Thermodynamics of Purpose," by David Hawkins, "The Physics of the Large," by Philip Morrison, and "The Ethical Dimension of Scientific Research," by Nicholas Rescher. In the last-mentioned lecture, Professor Rescher points up some generally little understood ethical problems confronted by the scientist in the practice of his profession. DARREL E. CICIRISTENSEN Wo]lord College BOOK NOTES Colin Cherry, On Human Communications: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1966. Pp. xiv + 337. (This is an unabridged and unaltered edition of the work first published by the M.I.T. Press in 1957.) $10.00. "In preparation of the current volume, I have examined the original carefully and have decided not to withdraw from anything said there, but merely to add some comments, to up- 390 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY date some figures, and to extend the bibliography.... Since detailed reference is impossible, I have decided to restrict the new Bibliography to useful sources of reference, a few of the more significant... (shrink)

Objective: To explore the experiences of people with a “terminal illness”, focusing on the patients’ perspective of euthanasia and assisted suicide.Method: A qualitative study using narrative interviews was conducted throughout the UK. The views of the 18 people who discussed euthanasia and assisted suicide were explored. These were drawn from a maximum variation sample, who said that they had a “terminal” illness, malignant or non-malignant.Results: That UK law should be changed to allow assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia was felt strongly (...) by most people. Those who had seen others die were particularly convinced that this should be a right. Some had multiple reasons, including pain and anticipated pain, fear of indignity, loss of control and cognitive impairment. Those who did not want to be a burden also had other reasons for wanting euthanasia. Suicide was contemplated by a few, who would have preferred a change in the law to allow them to end their lives with medical help and in the company of family or friends. The few who opposed a change in UK law, or who felt ambivalent, focused on involuntary euthanasia, cited religious reasons or worried that new legislation might be open to abuse.Conclusion: Qualitative research conducted on people who know they are nearing death is an important addition to the international debate on euthanasia and assisted suicide. Those who had seen others die were particularly convinced that the law should be changed to allow assisted death. (shrink)

In exploring his concept of interactional expertise in the context of managers of big science projects, Collins identifies the development and deployment tacit knowledge as central, but acknowledges that sociologically, he cannot probe the concept further in developmental or pedagogical directions. In using the term tacit knowledge, Collins relies on the concept as articulated by Michael Polanyi. In coining the term, Polanyi acknowledges his reliance on Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world. This paper explores how Polanyi, and so Collins, fails to (...) adequately ground the idea of the tacit in Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. In so doing, it employs a rereading of Being and Time to phenomenologically resituate the tacit. This resituating of the tacit allows us to go further than Collins in providing developmental and pedagogical approaches to the tacit in the context of the kind of interactional expertise that may be employed to enhance the effectiveness of collaborative, multi-and interdisciplinary teams like those found in team science and in professional settings like healthcare management. As illustrative, the paper provides an example of this resituated understanding of the tacit in the author’s work teaching in a multidisciplinary healthcare management program. (shrink)

Malpractice issues in psychotherapy and psychological treatments refer to the unethical behavior of a psychologist or psychotherapist toward the patient. The current study reviewed complaints directed at psychologists and psychotherapists in Sweden with regard to possible incidents of malpractice. Eligible cases were retrieved from a database managed by the Health and Social Care Inspectorate [Inspektionen för vård och omsorg (IVO)], an administrative authority responsible for the safety and quality of healthcare and social services delivery. These cases were analyzed using thematic (...) analysis. In total, 33 complaints matched the keywords proposed by IVO, and were scrutinized in detail. The cases primarily involved psychiatric care by a psychologist in outpatient settings, although many cases comprised multiple healthcare providers responsible for the patient’s care, or targeted the healthcare unit as a whole. The results demonstrated that different forms of malpractice occur, and can be classified in two general themes, Incorrect administration and implementation and Attitude and behavior, which involve organizational aspects as well as examples of malpractice and unethical behavior. Implications for clinical practice and future research include further training in ethics and malpractice, video recording or auditing sessions, routine outcome monitoring, and providing patients with information on how to file complaints. (shrink)

Dr de Zulueta articulates some important and commonly held concerns about the anonymised screening programme for HIV in pregnant women, which is one of a number of such programmes that are current. However, in my view, many of these concerns reflect a failure to understand two key distinctions.In both these regards, there is a danger of putting up a “straw man” for challenge. In this commentary, I wish to pick up some of these issues to help to resolve the apparent (...) ethical tensions that Dr de Zulueta has set out.Firstly, the unlinked seroprevalence surveillance programmes, including that on pregnant women, comprise research studies that are designed to inform policy and practice, as well as individual decision making. They are not screening for the purpose of clinical care. The anonymisation is a procedural research tool, which enables the studies to be done in a way that does not undermine consent or individual autonomy. The ethical standards and duties expected of professionals are thus, in this specific regard, those that relate to the conduct of clinical research. That research is evidently designed to improve the quality of clinical care as a result of the information and insight gained. The duty of care is to apply the results of properly conducted and valid research in order to improve clinical practice on behalf of the individuals receiving care, in this case the mother and unborn child. The research conducted, in this case by a particular form of screening procedure, is not the same as a screening procedure done for clinical purposes to identify individuals who could benefit from an intervention. The ethical debate must therefore focus on the purpose in applying the procedure, not on the procedure itself, regardless of intent.Secondly, it is vital to distinguish, in debating such …. (shrink)

BackgroundProfessional health care practice should be based on ethical decisions and actions. When there are competing ethical standards or principles, one must choose between two or more competing options. This study explores ethical dilemmas experienced by International Board Certified Lactation Consultants.MethodsThe investigator interviewed seven International Board Certified Lactation Consultants and analyzed the interviews using qualitative research methods.Results"Staying Mother-Centred" emerged as the overall theme. It encompassed six categories that emerged as steps in managing ethical dilemmas: 1) recognizing the dilemma; 2) identifying (...) context; 3) determining choices; 4) strategies used; 5) results and choices the mother made; and 6) follow-up. The category, "Strategies used", was further analyzed and six sub-themes emerged: building trust; diffusing situations; empowering mothers; finding balance; providing information; and setting priorities.ConclusionsThis study provides a framework for understanding how International Board Certified Lactation Consultants manage ethical dilemmas. Although the details of their stories changed, the essence of the experience remained quite constant with the participants making choices and acting to support the mothers. The framework could be the used for further research or to develop tools to support IBCLCs as they manage ethical dilemmas and to strengthen the profession with a firm ethics foundation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Normalizing” Intersex Didn’t Feel Normal or Honest to Me.Karen A. WalshI am an intersex woman with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). My 57–year history with this has its own trajectory—mostly driven by medical events, and how I and my parents reacted. Most of my treatment by physicians has not been positive. It didn’t make me “normal” at all. I was born normal and didn’t require medical interventions. And by (...) the way, I’ve never been confused about who or what I am.Truthful disclosure didn’t come to me about my biology and what was done to me as an infant until I was 33, when I forced the issue by removing my medical records from my endocrinologist’s office. I learned that there was never full disclosure to my [End Page 119] parents either, and therefore there was no informed consent for the “corrective” surgeries performed on me as an infant. My parents were only told that their little girl would get cancer and would not have a normal development as a girl unless her “deformed ovaries” were removed, and that they should never discuss these problems with me. Thus, after having presented with an inguinal hernia and having exploratory surgery at age 16 months, my intra–abdominal testes were removed in a second surgery two months later. I was pronounced a “male pseudohermaphrodite,” a diagnosis that was shared neither with my parents nor with me.Years later, I discovered an article my surgeon published in 1960 in the Delaware Medical Journal about me and another intersex person he operated on (whom he labeled a “true hermaphrodite”). The article gives a very detailed pathology report of my gonads, but only two sentences regarding my welfare and the rationale for performing those surgeries. Dr. J. F. Kustrup wrote in this article, “These [two cases] emphasize the need for early diagnosis and treatment in order to avoid the possibility of malignant change and to permit these individuals to follow a normal psychosexual pattern.” And: “Hermaphroditism and pseudohermaphroditism are conditions in which early diagnosis and treatment are essential to avoid malignant degeneration and to allow the child some chance toward normal pyschic [sic] development.” I was grateful to find this article because it revealed the unfounded assumptions underpinning the recommendations for treatment, much of which continues today. Worse even than the sort of social prejudice that shapes treatment is the absence of evidence for what doctors treat as “necessary” interventions. For my syndrome, CAIS, there never was—and still is not—data to support the cancer scare, or the opinion that I’d be confused and not have a normal life.From about the age of four, I can remember being different and being stonewalled by my doctor and prevented by my parents from talking about it. The feelings and fears I tried to express were shushed away, and I could tell that my questions were upsetting everyone. Even if I had wanted to be complicit with their lame diversions and nonsensical explanations, the massive abdominal scars were there as a daily reminder and hinted at a very different story.The Road to Hell is Paved with Good IntentionsGrowing up, I was treated like a fascinoma and a lab rat at a major teaching hospital on the East Coast. All I learned from those doctors as a young kid was what it feels like to be ogled, photographed and probed by a roomful of white–coated male doctors. Dissociation made itself my friend, and helped me to cope through the annual genital and anal exams and probing. I thought I was a freak and I felt completely powerless to protect myself from them and their “care”.At my annual appointment at age 12, with my mom present, three doctors told me I was infertile. Learning that I couldn’t have kids really saddened and shocked me, but there was no opportunity to talk about my feelings—either that day, or any time afterward. I was told to stop crying. I remember them telling me that there was no one else like me and that this was a random genetic anomaly, thereby reinforcing the freakishness... (shrink)

Background: There is a shortage of reports on what potential recipients of implantable cardioverter–defibrillators need to be informed about and what role they can and want to play in the decision-making process when it comes to whether or not to implant an ICD.Aims: To explore how patients with heart failure and previous episodes of malignant arrhythmia experience and view their role in the decision to initiate ICD treatment.Patients and methods: A qualitative content analysis of semistructured interviews was used. The (...) study population consisted of 31 outpatients with moderate heart failure at the time of their first ICD implantation.Setting: The study was performed at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Göteborg, Sweden.Results: None of the respondents had discussed the alternative option of receiving treatment with anti-arrhythmic drugs, the estimated risk of a fatal arrhythmia, or the expected time of survival from heart failure in itself. Even so, very little criticism was directed at the lack of information or the lack of participation in the decision-making process. The respondents felt that they had to rely on the doctors’ recommendation when it comes to such a complex and important decision. None of them regretted implantation of the ICD.Conclusions: The respondents were confronted by a matter of fact. They needed an ICD and were given an offer they could not refuse, simply because life was precious to them. Being able to give well-informed consent seemed to be a matter of less importance for them. (shrink)

Can merely thinking about an imaginary situation provide evidence for how the world actually is--or how it ought to be? In this lively book, Roy A. Sorensen addresses this question with an analysis of a wide variety of thought experiments ranging from aesthetics to zoology. Presenting the first general theory of thought experiment, he sets it within an evolutionary framework and integrates recent advances in experimental psychology and the history of science, with special emphasis on Ernst Mach and Thomas Kuhn. (...) Sorensen explores what thought experiments are, how they work, and what their virtues and vices are. In his view, philosophy differs from science in degree, but not in kind. For this reason, he claims, it is possible to understand philosophical thought experiments by concentrating on their resemblance to scientific relatives. Sorensen assesses the hazards of thought experiments and grants that there are interesting ways in which the method leads us astray, but attacks most scepticism about thought experiments as arbitrary. He maintains that they should be used--as they generally are--as part of a diversified portfolio of techniques, creating a network of cross-checks that make for impressive reliability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 197-201 [Access article in PDF] An Interview with Donald Mitchell and James Wiseman The 2002 Fred Streng Book Award has been given to Donald W. Mitchell and James Wiseman for their edited collection, The Gethsemani Encounter: A Dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics. Donald W. Mitchell is professor of comparative philosophy at Purdue University and a member of the editorial advisory (...) board of Buddhist-Christian Studies. James Wiseman is a member of the Benedictine community of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C., and is an associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America. Following is an edited interview with both.DONALD MITCHELL How long have Buddhist and Christian monastics been in dialogue? In 1978 the Benedictine Confederation founded what is now named the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) in order to develop intermonastic dialogue, especially with Buddhism. MID has been in dialogue with Buddhism in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Numerous MID spiritual exchanges and hospitality programs have taken place between Buddhist and Christian monastics over the years. How did the Dalai Lama get involved? His Holiness the Dalai Lama met with Thomas Merton in 1968, and from then on has been interested in Christian monasticism. He first got involved with MID when several of their members spoke with him at an East-West conference at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1981. This was the beginning of a series of intermonastic hospitality exchanges, with Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns visiting Christian monasteries in the United States and Christian monastics being hosted at Tibetan Buddhist sites in India. Years later, at the Parliament of World's Religions in 1993, MID hosted a Buddhist-Christian dialogue on "Emptiness and Kenosis." The Dalai Lama took part in the dialogue and afterward told MID that he felt its dialogue with Buddhism had matured to the point [where] it would be helpful to have a weeklong retreat dialogue on the spiritual life in Buddhism and Christianity. Where did Gethsemani enter the picture? The Dalai Lama asked if it would be possible to hold the spiritual dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey, home of his friend Thomas Merton. In 1994 MID sent a delegation [End Page 197] to Dharamsala to discuss the proposal in more depth with the Dalai Lama. An agreement was reached to hold a retreat dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey with Buddhist and Christian teachers of spirituality coming from around the world. You're not a monk. How did you get involved? Good question. A year later, Sister Mary Margaret Funk, executive director of MID, met with me to request that I help organize the encounter as a lay advisor to MID. MID had used my book, Spirituality and Emptiness: The Dynamics of Spiritual Life in Buddhism and Christianity, to prepare for the Parliament dialogue on kenosis and emptiness. I agreed to help with inviting the Buddhist participants, crafting the program, and editing the proceedings. What developments in the dialogue have you seen occurring over the years? Many developments. As you can imagine, the Gethsemani Encounter in 1996 was itself a spiritual experience. As Ewert Cousins put it, there seemed to be two treasure boxes—Buddhism and Christianity—set before us in a spiritual atmosphere that enabled us to appreciate the gems of spiritual living shared by the participants. So the encounter itself brought the dialogue to a new stage of trust, understanding, and appreciation. This development can be seen in the fact that Buddhist participants suggested a project be undertaken to produce a Buddhist commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict. The result is Benedict's Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict, edited by Patrick Henry and published by Riverhead Books in 2001. What else? A small group of American Buddhist leaders and MID members met in 1999 to discuss the possibility of holding a Gethsemani Encounter II. It was decided to bring the dialogue ahead by focusing on one of the major topics that came up again and again at Gethsemani I—namely, the... (shrink)

Franklin (U. of Colorado) challenges the postmodern or constructivist criticism of science and the post-Kuhnsian climate that dismisses science as a bit of a shady business. His nine essays, most previously published, defend science as a reasonable enterprise based on valid experimental evidence and critical discussion, which provides people with knowledge of the physical world. After establishing his own view of constructivism and postmodernism, he sets out four case studies then uses them to examine issues such as how discord between (...) experimental results is resolved, the calibration of experimental apparatus, and its legitimate use in validating results, and how experimental results provide reasonable grounds for a belief in both the truth of physical theories and the existence of the entities the theories concern. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

It is trivially true that comedians make jokes and thus are not serious; they are “just playing.” But watching Louis CK, especially his performances in Chewed Up, Shameless, and Hilarious, it is evident that he has more in mind than simply getting his audience to frivolously guffaw. I will make the case that this is so given the content of some of his humor which centers on areas of socio-political-ethical tensions that can be uncomfortable when addressed in a direct, “bona-fide” (...) communicative mode. I will concentrate upon his playful, yet serious, account of issues surrounding race and privilege which, though not obvious center-pieces, can be found in almost all of his performances. These are complex areas that are not obvious fodder for humor, and it is clear that his comedic repertoire is broad enough that he is not including these issues for lack of funnier bits. I will argue that through his humor, he at once brings to consciousness hidden biases, challenges them in a subversive manner on behalf of those harmed by cultural stereotypes, e.g., and opens up an otherwise adversarial audience to the possibility that they harbor such unwanted stereotypes—a necessary element in consciousness-raising. My account will require a brief distinction between seriousness and playfulness, a defense of the claim that we are drawn to humor even when it is used to question our cherished presuppositions, and an interpretation of thought experiments that parallels Louis CK’s comedic mechanisms in his stand-up performances and episodes from Louie. In some cases he is explicit that he is just “making shit up” (Oh My God), or, as he cautions in the setup to a story in Shameless, “it doesn’t matter cus’ I’m gonna lie to you.” But that does not take away from my point that he is serious with his humor about social reality in the same way that philosophers have traditionally “made shit up” with thought experiments for serious purposes. Louis CK employs a similar device with his humor, and in many ways is more effective than philosophers in making the implicit explicit for his (much larger) audiences who then spread his word. (shrink)

Any theory of reduction that goes only so far as carried in Parts I and II does only half the job. Prima facie at least, there are cases of would-be reduction which seem torn between two conflicting intuitions. On the one side there is a strong intuition that reduction is involved, and a strongly retentive reduction at that. On the other side it seems that the concepts at one level cross-classify those at the other level, so that there is no (...) way to identify properties at one level with those at the other. There is evidence to suggest that there will be no unique mental state/neural state association that can be set up, because, e.g., many different parts of the nervous system are all capable of taking over ‘control’ of the one mental function. And it is alleged that infinitely many, worse: indefinitely many, different bio-chemo-physical states could correspond to the economic property ‘has a monetary system of economic exchange’; and similarly for the property ‘has just won a game of tennis’. Yet one doesn't want an economic system or a game of tennis to be some ghostly addition to the actual bio-chemo-physical processes and events involved. Similarly one hopes that neurophysiology allied with the rest of natural science will render human experience and behaviour explicable. (shrink)

BackgroundAs moral case deliberations (MCDs) have increasingly been implemented in health care institutions as a form of ethics support, it is relevant to know whether and how MCDs actually contribute to positive changes in care. Insight is needed on what actually happens in daily care practice following MCD sessions. This study aimed at investigating the impact of MCD and exploring how ‘impact of MCD’ should be conceptualized for future research.MethodsA multiple-case study was conducted in a care organization for people with (...) intellectual disabilities and/or acquired brain injury, by observing MCD sessions as ‘cases’, followed by interviews with health care professionals concerning the follow-up to these cases, and a focus group with involved MCD facilitators. A conceptual scheme concerning the possible impact formed the basis for analysis: (1) individual moral awareness; (2) the actions of health care professionals; (3) collaboration among health care professionals; (4) the concrete situation of the client; (5) the client’s quality of care and life; (6) the organizational and policy level.ResultsAccording to interviewees, their moral awareness and their collaboration, both among colleagues and with clients’ relatives, improved after MCD. Perceived impact on client situation, quality of care/life and the organizational level varied among interviewees or was difficult to define or link to MCD. Three aspects were added to the conceptual scheme concerning the impact of MCD: (a) preparations and expectations prior to the MCD session; (b) a translational step between the conclusions of the MCD session and practical events in the following period, and (c) collaboration with clients’ relatives. A negative impact of MCD was also found on misunderstandings among participants and disappointment about lack of follow-up.ConclusionsConcretizing and conceptualizing the ‘impact’ of MCD is complicated as many factors play a role either before or during the transition from MCD to practice. It is important to consider ‘impact’ in a broad sense and to relate it to the goals and context of the MCD in question. Future studies in this field should pay additional attention to the preparations, content and process involved in ethics support, including clients’ and relatives’ experiences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture by Richard B. MillerBill BarbieriFriends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture Richard B. Miller new york: columbia university press, 2016. 416 pp. $60.00In his studies on casuistry, war and peace, pediatric ethics, and other occasional topics Richard B. Miller has for some time been a leading source of creative impulses in the field of religious (...) ethics, so it is a welcome event to have this volume organizing past essays of his into a thematically cohesive presentation. His book sets out a vision of the character and concerns of religious ethics that helps counter critics, such as Stanley Hauerwas, who have expressed skepticism about the field.The governing conception of Friends and Other Strangers is that the study of religious ethics is properly shaped by attending to how "our lives ineluctably oscillate between experiences of intimacy and otherness" (5). Accordingly, Miller seeks to guide the field beyond either a one-sided focus on matters of friendship and special relations or a preoccupation with alterity and heterology. To grasp how the dialectic of intimacy and alterity shapes the normative character of personal and public life, he recommends religious ethicists should employ "the category of culture as an organizing rubric" (6).In the book's initial section Miller elaborates on his view of the enterprise of religious ethics and its place in the broader intellectual landscape. In a discussion drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and James Gustafson, Miller first offers his account of the characteristic concerns and history of the field. He then presents the case for a "cultural turn" in religious ethics, arguing not only that practitioners would benefit from incorporating anthropology and cultural studies into their work but that they should extend their ambit to normative questions throughout the academy. Responding to the problems of ethnocentrism and the moral authority of outsiders in criticizing cultural practices, Miller rounds out the section by proposing constructive norms for nonchauvinistic social criticism in multicultural contexts.Among the remaining essays are several that showcase Miller's appreciation of Augustine as a principal source of ethical insight. In a chapter scrutinizing the case for replacing disembodied patterns of moral reasoning with an "ethics of empathy," he proposes that Augustine's ethics of love can sharpen our grasp of both the possibilities and pitfalls of empathy as a moral value. Writing on friendship and evil, Miller invokes the Augustinian "theocentric imaginary" as a guide to how intimacy and alterity are balanced in friendship. And taking [End Page 194] up the ethics and social psychology of war, he presents Augustine's writings on the morality of killing as a source for just war standards that can be applied in cross-cultural normative criticism. That Augustine's seminal reflections on time and memory do not appear in a further chapter on "the moral and political burdens of memory" is a slight disappointment, no doubt attributable to the chapter's origins as a review essay.Other topics tellingly subjected to Miller's characteristically nuanced and sharp analysis include indignation and solidarity, responsibilities to children, and democracy and public reason. A bonus chapter collects six lengthy reviews of recent books—five on topics related to Islam—touted by Miller as exemplary in their embodiment of a cultural turn in religious ethics.Given its endorsement of a "cultural turn" in ethics, the book would have benefited from deeper reflection on discrete meanings of "culture," "cultures," and their various cognates. In addition, the individual chapters, originating in diverse settings, are not all equally well integrated into the book's governing themes. Overall, however, Miller's book amply succeeds in its Geertzian task of presenting both a model of and a model for the field of religious ethics. A fine distillation of the thought of a leading figure in the guild, it is essential reading for serious students of ethics.Bill BarbieriCatholic UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bridge From Analysis to Action:Psychodynamic Analyses of Religion and Michael S. Hogue's American ImmanenceAJ Turner (bio)I. IntroductionThe purpose of this essay is to work constructively with Michael S. Hogue's groundbreaking American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World to demonstrate how psychodynamic analyses of religion are essential theoretical allies in the fight for resilient democracy. The "revolution in mind"1 that psychodynamic approaches contribute, especially in their analyses of religion, (...) both complements and complicates socio-political theory as a whole. In the improvisational spirit of "yes-and," the goal here is not to identify and decry the failures and shortcomings of Hogue's theopolitical vision but rather to inspire the recovery of a sibling discourse—a kind of "rebirth of a forgotten alternative"2—that also draws deeply from the American immanental tradition in order to add psychodynamic depth to Hogue's timely and important analysis. Psychodynamic theories of religion shed light on how symbolic identifications, including and especially ultimate concerns, structure personal and collective experience. By engaging religion and theology sympathetically, constructively, and creatively, theorists such as Rollo May, Gordon Allport, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Ernest Becker departed from the skepticism, reductionism, and dismissal that characterized psychoanalytic analyses of religion in the wake of Freud.3 Each of these figures, and especially Becker whose work will be a focus in this essay, are noteworthy interlocutors for extending Hogue's theopolitical theorizing of resilient democracy, particularly in how they drew unique inspiration from the American immanental tradition [End Page 44] in their social analyses. In this respect, they provide a more robust theorization of the psychosocial conditions of the associational ethos needed to connect Hogue's conception of resilient democracy with forms of agonistic organization and democratic activism. Briefly stated, psychodynamic approaches are a helpful bridge for connecting these proposals to strategies of organization, their impediments, and collective action.In this way, both psychodynamic analyses of religion and Hogue's theopolitical innovation insist that no revolutionary political change is possible, and certainly not of the kind or scale needed to counter our wickedly entangled global crises, without a deep engagement with theological imaginaries. They differ, however, in their theoretical aims. Whereas Hogue compellingly argues for the political upshot of a theology deriving from the American immanental tradition, psychodynamic analysts of religion focus on the function of ultimate concerns in individual and collective life. In other words, American Immanence rests on a methodology of analyzing the philosophical and theological assumptions that have contributed to our climate crises and then presenting clear and compelling articulation of an alternative paradigm meant to open up new ways of being. In contrast psychodynamic analyses leverage conceptual clarity of psychic reality for the fundamentally therapeutic aim of transformation. At their best, both approaches share what could be called an etiological orientation to ontological questions in order to provide liberative alternatives through rational understanding and clarification, but the terrain, and thus the problems they hope to mitigate in their analyses are focused differently. Extending the visual metaphor, they are different lenses highlighting different areas of the same landscape. Furthermore, it must be said that neither are sufficient in themselves, but the psychodynamic theorists of religion to be highlighted in this essay share deeply with Hogue's heading in American Immanence.II. A Problematic AssumptionIn emphasizing and attempting to explain4 the role of non-rational processes in the both individual and social processes of perception and organization of experience, psychodynamic theories confound a widely held and problematic assumption that the triumph of rational analysis is the hallmark for building the society to which we should aspire. Political theory in general, [End Page 45] especially as it has taken its cues from a rationalist legacy about the inherently liberating force of Reason, has been weighted toward an assumption that its task of exposing the mystifications of power would suffice in inspiring more "rational" and therefore necessarily equitable social organization. This speaks to the longstanding socio-political interest in "consciousness raising" tactics, which are often meant to dispel "false consciousness." It even comes across in the emphases of Deweyan pragmatists on education. Psychologists of all stripes point out that this approach... (shrink)

This provocative but persuasive book is essentially a radical attack upon the Humean conception of causality and the presentation and defense of a counter-theory, closer to everyday experience and pre-Humean traditional views. As formulated by empiricist philosophers, the Humean approach depends on two basic postulates. The philosophical analysis of any non-empirical concept must be a formal explication; any residue elements have to be accounted for in terms of their psychological origins. The world as experienced can be conceived adequately as (...) a logically independent system of things or flux of events, without the unwarranted assumption that individuals persist diachronically. As the grounds for undermining these assumptions, the authors develop a conception of causes as "powerful particulars," i.e., things which have both a nature and powers. So long as the nature remains unchanged the agent in question will continue to behave in this fashion with a natural necessity, stemming from the individual’s nature and specific powers. The opening chapter discusses the problem of conceptual and natural necessity—as distinct from logical necessity which alone is allowed by the Humean empiricists. Natural necessity is the mark of the relationship between real causes and their respective effects, whereas conceptual necessity characterizes the way our statements about such are themselves related. Later the irreducibility of natural necessity is emphasized and its differences from logical entailment spelled out. Chapter two takes up the subject of the "regularity theory and its allies." Characteristic of such are two claims: the empirical content of a causal-relationship statement is exhausted by the actual or hypothetical regularity between independent entities, and the necessity ordinarily attributed to causal production is an illusion, to be accounted for in various ways. Subsequent chapters are devoted to assaulting the pillars of the Humean notion either directly or indirectly through an illuminating and attractive account of their own theory of nature, causal powers, and natural necessity. The final chapter, entitled "Fields of Potential," indulges in speculation about the nature of ultimate entities on the basis of an extended generalization of the notion of the powerful individual, and concludes with a brief account of the historical antecedents of Faraday’s modern field theory and the metaphysical implications of a generalized field theory.—A.B.W. (shrink)

The emotions are at the centre of our lives and, for better or worse, imbue them with much of their significance. The philosophical problems stirred up by the existence of the emotions, over which many great philosophers of the past have laboured, revolve around attempts to understand what this significance amounts to. Are emotions feelings, thoughts, or experiences? If they are experiences, what are they experiences of? Are emotions rational? In what sense do emotions give meaning to what surrounds us? (...) -/- The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction introduces and explores these questions in a clear and accessible way. The authors discuss the following key topics: -/- the diversity and unity of the emotions the relations between emotion, belief and desire the nature of values the relations between emotions and perceptions emotions viewed as evaluative attitudes the link between emotions and evaluative knowledge the nature of moods, sentiments, and character traits. -/- Including chapter summaries and guides to further reading, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal starting point for any philosopher or student studying the emotions. It will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as psychology and the social sciences. (shrink)

Marc Lange’s new book on laws offers a restatement and development of the account he proposed in Natural Laws and Scientific Practice (Oxford University Press, 2000), henceforth NLSP, and the new material is helpfully summarized in the preface. Laws and Lawmakers presents the key idea from NLSP in a rather more reader-friendly manner – this idea being roughly that the difference between laws and accidents is that laws, unlike accidents, form a ‘stable’ set, i.e. a logically closed set of (...) truths such that they would all still hold under any counterfactual supposition consistent with the set. So, for example, the natural laws all still hold under counterfactual suppositions such as ‘had this match been struck …’, ‘had Bill Gates wanted to build a gold cube one mile across’ and so on; thus this set is stable. But the set of laws plus the accidental claim ‘there is no gold cube one mile across’ fails to hold under such counterfactual suppositions because had Bill Gates wanted to build a gold cube one mile across, such a cube might well have come into existence; thus this set is not stable. While the basic outline and defence of this idea is provided in Chapter 1, those wishing to delve into the intricate …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Humanism, Female Education, and Myth:Erasmus, Vives, and More's To CandidusA. D. CousinsWhen considering pleasure and chance as aspects of human experience, Thomas More sometimes gendered them female; that is to say, at times he represented them by drawing from the mythographies of Venus and of Fortune. But what did he suggest that actual women, as distinct from goddesses, were or should be or might become: what were his (...) notions of being a woman, of femaleness? Further, what did he suggest that women might contribute to the common weal? A useful way to start answering that question is to look at what More seems to have thought about educating women: in particular, women who were entering adult life—entering into what was agreed to be the major female role—by marrying for the first time and therefore newly taking upon themselves the management of a household. In one of his most ambitious Latin poems, as nowhere else, More wrote elaborately, concisely and problematically on the education of women who were in just those circumstances. My discussion attempts a repositioning of that poem, To Candidus: How to Choose A Wife A Poem in Iambic Dimeter Brachycatalectic (Versvs Iambici Dimetri Brachycatalectici ad Candidvm, Qvalis Vxor Deligenda). To make the attempt involves examining More's other Latin poems on women, as would be anticipated; however, I am mainly concerned here with affinities between To Candidus—then, to a lesser extent, some of More's associated Latin poems—and notions about female education that were or were to become part of the already long, and mostly male, debate about the nature of femaleness.1 To be [End Page 213] specific, I am chiefly concerned with affinities between More's poem and writings by Erasmus and by Vives on the education of prospective or of recent brides.Because the primary concern in my discussion is to clarify the relations between More's To Candidus and humanist notions on female education, especially notions put forward by two of More's humanist friends about young brides, I want initially to revisit the early modern debate on educating women, of course an important element of the wider debate about femaleness itself. One medieval and thence early modern idea on female education was that, in addition to what their mothers taught them, most women needed merely to receive religious and ethical instruction from their husbands, who would likewise instruct them in how to govern a household.2 After all, it was often pointed out, the household was women's natural domain: since, therefore, they would not normally engage with the world at large as would men—since, for example, they would not normally be educators, or writers, or politicians—women did not usually need the broad education appropriate to men.3 Assertion to the contrary was variously argued—and differences between or among those contrary assertions did not always depend on whether an author was male or female. In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), a response to Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris and, perhaps unknowingly, also to Plutarch's The Virtues of Women, Christine de Pizan attempted to construct at once a refuge and a resource for [End Page 214] women, whom she recognized as having been misrepresented to themselves no less than to men throughout generations of misogynistic male fictions, ranging from satire to epic, from fable to history.4 Her City, in so far as it is a revisionist history of women, forms a textual space which does indeed offer a refuge as well as a resource, for Christine advocates that women, fulfilling their capabilities as women, aim at "cultivat[ing] virtue" and thereby gaining inclusion in the true, illustrious record of female achievement: membership of a textual community within which they will see themselves reflected and which is at one with the City of God.5 Inseparable from their seeking to do so, she emphasizes, will be their receiving education.6 Despite that emphasis—and despite her emphasizing that women are men's intellectual equals or, not infrequently, superiors—Christine nevertheless defends the concept that the domestic sphere and not the public is in general that "appropriate" to women.7... (shrink)

This study starts from the premise that mandala is a design of the Cosmos and consciousness. mandala is a contracted and systematically designed cosmic space and represents high-level spirituality at the same time. The work of designing mandala is an experience with a sacred world as itself and constitutes a process of self-discipline. In other words, mandala is to ritualize the world of Buddhism beyond a design context and visualize religious experience through a specific object. Therefore, it serves (...) as a medium that gets both producers and audiences to experience the sacred world. In this way, mandala is present as an experiencing design and a behaving medium. This study aims to identify the archetype of empirical and synthetic design by analyzing mandala as an integrated icon for which the Cosmos and human beings or consciousness and matter meet each other. Spatial structuralization is considered most important in the icon of mandala. The space in mandala is the place where consciousness joins reality, which represents the state of enlightenment. Many multi-dimensional Buddhas coexist in the space, and they are arranged in harmony and in order. This visual structure allows mandala to play the role of interactive medium. In the iconic shapes of mandala symbolizing a sacred world, major elements include a circle, square, semicircle, triangle and the numbers of 8 and 4. The respective shapes are matched to white, yellow, red and black, and the five different senses are connected to one another. The five senses are symbolic of earth, water, fire, wind and void which constitute the universe, and again they remain connected to five different parts of the body of a disciplinant drawing mandala: liver, kidney, spleen, lungs and heart. Those organs are associated with five Buddhas and in turn connected through the boundless space of the universe. By analyzing such a composite structure of mandala, this study tries to appreciate its in-depth meaning as an integrated design. (shrink)

Introduction In 2007, a national review committee was instituted in The Netherlands to review cases of active ending of life for newborns. It was expected that 15–20 cases would be reported. To date, however, only one case has been reported to this committee. Reporting is essential to obtain societal control and transparency; the possible explanations for this lack of reporting were therefore explored. Methods Data on end-of-life decision-making were scrutinised from Dutch nation-wide studies (1995, 2001 and 2005), before institution of (...) the committee. Physicians received a questionnaire about their medical decision-making for stratified samples of deceased infants up to 1 year, drawn from the central death registry. Results In 2005, 58% of all deaths were preceded by an end-of-life decision, compared with 68% in 2001 and 62% in 1995. The use of drugs with a possible life-shortening effect tended to be lower. In 2005, all four cases in the study in which an infants' life was actively ended were preceded by a decision to forego life-prolonging treatment. In three cases, the infant's life expectancy was short; one case involved a longer life expectancy. Discussion The expected number of cases is probably an overestimation due to changes in medical practice such as the tendency to attribute less life-shortening effects to opioids. The lack of reports is probably also associated with requirements in the regulation; it may be difficult to fulfil them due either to time constraints or the nature of the suffering that is addressed. If societal control of active ending of life is considered useful, changes in the regulation may be needed. (shrink)